In the last six months, he went on, there have been two deaths, apparently by suicide. The victims were both high-level banking executives in soon-to-be merged institutions. Each seems to have leaped...
I walked the short distance to Nogizaka, then strolled up and down Gaienhigashi-dori. It took awhile, but I finally spotted it. There was no sign, only a small red rose on a black awning. The entrance...
I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware, a sensibility that, though frequently obscured during cherry blossom viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-...
I picked up the earthen cup and went to take a sip. Not like that, Miyamoto said. Let it cool a little. Give yourself a moment to appreciate the aroma, the feel of the bowl in your hands. I was a litt...
I headed back to Shun Tak to catch the next ferry to Macau. I tried not to think too much about what I was about to do. Charging an ambush is counterinstinctive: when your lizard brain identifies the...
I felt like Schrödinger’s cat. She would come, or not come. She would take me in, or throw me out. She would forgive me, or tell me to fuck off. And in that narrow, purgatorial space, a feeling crept...
I didn’t think you’d know it. You’re a little… older. I laughed. If she’d been trying to get a rise out of me, she had missed the mark. I’m never going to be sensitive about my age. Most of the people...
His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone...
Do all the people who know me know me better than I know myself?
At the outset of the second of these Hong Kong excursions, I noticed an Arab standing in the lobby of the Macau Mandarin Oriental as we moved through it. He was new, not one of Belghazi’s bodyguards....
And maybe on some level his approach was manipulative, but what mattered most was the way it made her feel. Like he understood her, without ever having to be heavy-handed about it.
And I resented you for that, she went on, because I’ve always believed hate is such an unworthy emotion. So weak and ultimately pointless. I marveled briefly at how innocent a life someone would have...
Your biggest problem would be getting the victim up to the roof with no one seeing it. Unless you had some way of tricking him into meeting you on a rooftop or otherwise knowing in advance that he was...
You start slow. You find the subject’s limits and get him to spend some time there. He gets used to it. Before long, the limits have moved. You never take him more than a centimeter beyond. You make i...
You forget the things you want to remember and remember the things you want to forget.
You don’t just childproof your guns, was how he put it. You also gun-proof your child.
When you’ve known someone only briefly, even if intensely, death comes as a shock, but not a particularly long or deep one. After all, there was no time for the person in question to become woven tigh...
We took a cab to the hotel. We looked at each other on the way but neither of us spoke. I checked us in, and when we got to the room, we left the lights off. It seemed natural that we should walk over...
The person who returns from living abroad isn't the same person who left originally... Your outlook changes. You don't take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York tha...
The owner of a coffee shop sat diminished in the back of his deserted establishment, waiting for patronage that had long since vanished.